The Box

Title: The Box – How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

Author: Marc Levinson

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2006 (First)

ISBN: 9780691123240

Pages: 376

The period after the death of Soviet Union in the early 1990s is taken to be the time globalization took birth. Though historians would propose the early 19^th century in the aftermath of Napoleonic wars, or even the late 16^th century after the settling of the New World as the contenders to the start of globalization, there is no denying that the last decade of the last century saw tremendous improvement in international trade. Whereas raw materials came in one direction and end products travelled the other in earlier times, that pattern became increasingly blurred. Manufacturers could easily source intermediate products from far off places and that too, just in time. The Barbie Doll was made entirely in the U.S. earlier. Now the doll is manufactured in China, with clothes from Korea, hair from the U.S., colour from Japan and likewise. In this catalog of the tremendous pace of manufacturing in the era of globalization, one thing stands apart as the prime factor in helping achieve the goals – cheap and fast transport of cargo from one corner of the world to the other in containers. Hardly 50 years before, nobody had used it, while now, those who don’t use it is a nobody. Marc Levinson tells the thrilling story of containers from its conceptual stages to the modern era. The style is crisp and witty. With extensively researched data on cargo, Levinson has made an excellent work that presents the complexities of international trade simplified as to be enjoyable by general readers as well. The author is an economist in New York and has authored three books earlier. He had associated with leading economics publications like the Economist.

As an introduction, Levinson presents the sorry plight of dock workers and the enormous time and money wasted in transporting goods from one end of the globe to the other. A ship normally carries tens of thousands of discrete items in one journey. In the pre-container era, each of these items were separately packaged and stowed on board. This evidently led to wastage of space, which resulted in loss to the shipping company. As a result, manufacturers preferred to set up shop as near to customers as possible. Rapid industrialization seen after the Second World War in the western countries is the result of this trend. As market dynamics shifted and low-cost, long-distance shipping was made feasible with the use of containers, employers got the upper hand in bargaining with unions. If they proved too belligerent the factory owners could relocate to a Third World country, where the labour costs were dead cheap and the transportation costs were also low. In fact this factor contributed a great deal to the rise of globalization which we now take for granted. Dock workers were a tough lot before, in terms of the job they were doing and also when they were assessed on the personal level. The longshoreman had difficulty in finding a daily job for loading and unloading the ships. The work was hard, steady and not intellectually challenging. Supply far exceeded demand which encouraged cronyism and bribery on the part of harbour masters. Sometimes the workmen had to literally fight their way for a day’s work. With the advent of reforms, such practices were curtailed and with the coming of containers such jobs were effaced out of the industry altogether.

Malcom (sic) Purcell McLean was the man who turned pivotal in the development of containers. Curiously he had no idea about shipping when he began his business of transportation through trucks. He used containers for lorry transport, which reduced the loading and unloading times. In a bid to expand his operations, McLean transported entire trucks on board ships to save costs. This gradually led to the containers themselves placed on the deck, which can be loaded to a waiting truck at the destination. McLean acquired shipping companies to try his novel ideas and his Pan Atlantic shipping line introduced the Sea-Land service, which later became a byname for container freight. On April 26, 1956, a ship sailed from Port Newark to Houston with containers, heralding a new era in the history of maritime trade. However, the new device didn’t find favour with labour unions that effectively ruled the Atlantic and Pacific costs of the U.S., wringing concession after concession from the shipping lines. Limitations of geography and traffic congestion were eating into the worthiness of New York’s ports, shifting the business to New Jersey coast. Unions took a demanding line in negotiations with the management in the general atmosphere of New York’s declining business and loss of jobs due to automation. Levinson paints a gruesome picture of the dock environment in which unions exercised their will under the always present threat of strike. In any industry, the management exploits the workers till they are organized into unions. The tide then reverses, in which the power conferred by collective bargaining constrain the management in no small measure. On the west coast of the country, ILWU, the more pragmatic of the unions reached a mechanization and modernization agreement with the ship lines in 1960, which was realized by the employers paying a huge sum of money in the form of guaranteeing income of workers who stood to lose their jobs on the account of automation and also to ensure sufficient funds for retirement of the workers. The east coast workers also reached a similar agreement in the form of guaranteed annual income. The chapter titled ‘Union Disunion’ presents a ring side view of the dock labour environment in the U.S. during the 50s and 60s.

When we look at the inventions that have since became ubiquitous, we tend to wonder at how the society could have lived without it, before it came into being. Electricity is one such thing and judging from the book, containers also deserve mention in that group. The entire shipping is now dominated by containers, thanks to its inherent advantages like low cost and less time for loading and unloading. However, Levinson presents a different story in the first decade since the first ship sailed with containers in 1956. The size of the box was not standardized. This released a huge set of problems in the shipping arena that was still smarting from its introduction. The cranes, trucks and rail cars used for transporting one company’s containers couldn’t be used for containers of other ship lines. Standards-making agencies like American Standards Association (ASA) and International Standards Organization (ISO) immediately entered the fray to make norms for sizing individual containers. After hectic deliberations that involved countries from both sides of the Atlantic, the world eventually settled on boxes having lengths in multiples of 10 feet, the most commonly used being 20 footers. As the standard war was heating up American shipping, Europe and Asia waited for finalization of it. So when the standards were adopted, they quickly came on the fray and derived maximum benefit out of it. Even now, the top six positions in terms of world container traffic are occupied by Asian ports – Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Busan and Kaoshung. Containers got a big boost in international shipping which helped ease the logical nightmares faced by the U.S. military in Vietnam in 1956. Over a period of a few months, the military was thoroughly convinced of the efficiency of containers. Even with all this, it is ironic to learn that the father of containerization, Malcom McLean died a bankrupt, having lost his money in shipping after his plans were upset by geopolitics in the form of unexpected falls and rallies of oil price. All the container ships around the world sounded their whistles at the instant of McLean’s cremation as a mark of respect.

The book could have done better with a few photographs that would add interest. Levinson sells his ideas on containers with conviction, but some of the claims seem to be a little too tall. He assigns the great increase in international trade to the better conditions provided by containerization. This is hardly the case. Apart from easing some of the bottlenecks that was hindering trade expansion, containers were greatly affected by the oscillating equations of global commerce and its pricing policies. Instead of asserting one to be the direct offspring of the other, we can only grant that globalization and containerization are the two streams that merged to produce the revolution that we see today. The book includes a fine section of notes, a good bibliography and a thorough index.

This book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star